This is the question posed by the new exhibition of the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina entitled Manipulating Reality. How images redefine the world.

Twenty-three international artists use photography and video-art to manipulate our perception of the visible world and to build new models of reality. The great contradiction that characterizes photography and video-art is that both pretend to record reality while being, at the same time, a falsification of that reality. This ambiguity has if anything increased with the spreading popularity of easy-to-use digital technology and the massive dissemination of images through the mass media and the Internet; the conflict between appearance and reality is pushed to its outer edges and demands that the spectator play an active role in defining what he or she is seeing as real.The new exhibition, the idea for which came from a CCCS project that availed itself of the scientific advice of Brett Rogers (director of the Photographers' Gallery of London), Luminita Sabau (director of the DZ Bank Collection of Contemporary Photography in Germany), Martino Marangoni (director of the Fondazione Marangoni, Florence) and Franziska Nori (project director with the CCCS).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with entries written by university professors, by experts in the visual arts, and by sociologists: James der Derian (professor of International Studies at Brown University), Harald Welzer (Centre for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, University of Essen), Elena Esposito (professor of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of Modena), Maria Janina Vitale (art historian, with a specialization in contemporary photography).Check all the names of the artists and the details of the exhibition at the website: www.strozzina.org/manipulatingreality